How technology is making cheating easier

Cheater cheater pumpkin eater: Cheating is a large problem in our schools. Junior Heather Head diligently works on her assignment while her peers Junior Kylie Davis copy her work and Junior Skylar Sutton takes pictures of her work to copy later. “ugh, dang cheaters” Head said.

This past year, technology has advanced in countless ways – from the iPhone 8, new laptops, to cars that can park themselves. Technology is evolving every second and influencing people’s everyday lives in positive ways, but technology also has its negative effects. One prime example is cheating. Students have all different devices to access, especially the newly introduced Chromebooks.

“I definitely think Chromebooks have some pros and cons to them; for example, some kids can look up summaries for a book they were supposed to read and use that for a quiz,” junior Haile Cho said.

Chromebooks can be a good use of technology, it just depends on how students use them to their benefit. Students have also used their phones to cheat.

“One time I saw someone in my math class use their lockscreen as a way to cheat,” junior Kendal Solis said. “They made their math notes their lockscreen so all they had to do was take a glance at their phone and knew how to do the math problems.”

When there’s only one teacher watching multiple students, they can’t catch everything. Chemistry and Biology teacher, Kaitlin Coleman, as well as many other teachers have seen plenty of instances of cheating in their classrooms.

“Cheating grows every year, and the cause of that is technology,” Coleman said. “[…] I used to let kids listen to music after a test/quiz, but a student took a picture of a test and sent it to their friends, which resulted in a consequence for all of my students, of no phones at all on test days because of one student.”

The advance in technology has changed the world in several ways, good and bad, but the possibilities of cheating are proceeding to get worse. Whether students will cheat or not depends on their morality. Students in this new day and age will become more trustworthy and not lean towards cheating because it shows their true intentions with their education. Hopefully they won’t lean towards an easy way out of their education, as it will affect them negatively down the road.